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The Sound of a Car Backshifting

March 24, 2026·32 min·2 clips
Shakespeare's characters weren't being witty—they were just showing off their knowledge.
The host starts by refusing the heavy version of the moment. Terrible things are happening as he records, but he does not want to camp there. He wants to sit with listeners for a bit and enjoy the old pleasure of noticing how English works. The outside world is still there. This is just a small recess from it. Then the excerpt turns to etymology, and the fun is in how ordinary English suddenly looks odd beside its neighbors. Knowing is not always one verb. French has connaître, Spanish has conocer, and German has kennen for knowing a person, or being acquainted with one. English used to have that split too. Witon handled knowing a fact, the neat two-plus-two kind of knowledge. Knawan handled knowing someone in the human, familiar sense. English flattened it. Wit wandered off from that old job, knawan turned into know, and modern speakers got one plain verb where those other languages kept two. The dry joke is that English learners often treat the French, Spanish, and German split as the strange thing, when McWhorter is really saying English is the one that got casual. Spelling does some nice work here. Knawan, knaw, and know still look related, so the modern word stops seeming random and starts looking like a family survivor. Wit gets its later career too. McWhorter points to an example he knows from 1744, where satire is called witty and severe against mischievous habits or vices. The George Washington aside gives the timeline a little shove. Then the ad arrives hard. The Hello Fresh break cuts off the thread, so the keeper here is the short pre-break lesson: English lost one kind of knowing and gave wit a new life.

As heard by us

A relaxed language episode about where words come from and how English keeps part of an older split in knowing.

This episode moves at an easy pace, with John McWhorter treating word origins as a conversational puzzle rather than a lecture. The focus stays on an old split in English ways of knowing, then on the later story of "witty." That gives the discussion a light, slightly amused…

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Why you'd press play

If you like words with old bones, this episode has your number, exactly.

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